Monday, 16 July 2018

GROWING FEATHERS

This morning I discovered there are many reasons why my blackbird is no longer waiting for me on my window sill or in the nearby tree and most of them can be found in a 2013 BBC article Where Have All My Garden Birds Gone The link is http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/natureuk/entries/188f15e1-f71b-431e-8999-43dc578b4cd4And of those reasons I am choosing to post the following one This is partly because I have a spoken word track which includes a few words about growing feathers 'As we get into the end of the breeding season, a lot of your garden regulars will enter the moult. This is the time of year when many birds lose their feathers, and replace them with fresh new ones ahead of the winter. Many juvenile birds will lose their young plumage, ready to emerge as adults. Whilst necessary, this process puts a lot of pressure on a little bird. The energy cost to grow a new set of feathers is high, and losing a primary wing feather or two can really make a difference when trying to evade a predator. For this reason, a lot of the birds in your garden will lay low, skulking in bushes and hiding in hedges.'The article may also help to explain more about my perceived close affinity with blackbirds- athough in my case a tendency to lay low and skulk is not restricted to any particular season As for the 'growing of feathers': they belong in a selection of words entitled ON THE WAY TO SONG which I compiled months ago The words are And
where are the birds In
all this rain

They've
disappeared completely

From
the park and down the lane

Surely
having feathers

Makes
them immune

Perhaps
if I could grow some

I
could be immune to you

The recordings were mastered and then foolishly uploaded onto Bandcamp Foolishly because as the title suggests they were on the way to becoming something - and were not yet there And this reflects another questionable tendency i.e an impatience to move too quickly on from an old task to a new one However I am also not against going backwards and/or regressing (a bit) and I may reapproach On the Way to Song and decide what if anything I should do with it now